Fraktur ({{IPA-de|fÊakËtuËÉÌ¯|lang|De-Fraktur.ogg}}) is a calligraphic hand of the Latin alphabet and any of several blacklettertypefaces derived from this hand. The blackletter lines are broken up; that is, their forms contain many angles when compared to the smooth curves of the Antiqua (common) typefaces modeled after antique Roman square capitals and Carolingian minuscule. From this, Fraktur is sometimes contrasted with the "Latin alphabet" in northern European texts, which is sometimes called the "German alphabet", simply being a typeface of the Latin alphabet. Similarly, the term "Fraktur" or "Gothic" is sometimes applied to all of the blackletter typefaces (known in German as , "Broken Script").The word derives from Latin ("a break"), built from , passive participle of ("to break"), the same root as the English word "fracture".Unicode has a set of Fraktur letters intended for use as mathematical alphanumeric symbols:

Characteristics

Besides the 26 letters of the ISO basic Latin alphabet,ISO basic Latin alphabet is derived from the English alphabet hence its 26 letters. Fraktur includes the Ã ( {{IPA-de|ÉsËtsÉt|}}), vowels with umlauts, and the Å¿ (long s). Some Fraktur typefaces also include a variant form of the letter r known as the r rotunda, and many a variety of ligatures which are left over from cursive handwriting and have rules for their use. Most older Fraktur typefaces make no distinction between the majuscules "I" and "J" (where the common shape is more suggestive of a "J"), even though the minuscules "i" and "j" are differentiated.One difference between the Fraktur and other blackletter scripts is that in the lower case o, the left part of the bow is broken, but the right part is not. In Danish texts composed in Fraktur, the letter Ã¸ was already preferred to the German and Swedish Ã¶ in the 16th century.Compare, for example,. 1550. {{da icon}} and . 1633. {{da icon}}

Origin

The first Fraktur typeface arose in the early 16th century, when Emperor Maximilian I commissioned the design of the Triumphal Arch woodcut by and had a new typeface created specifically for this purpose, designed by . Fraktur types for printing were established by the publisher at the issuance of a series of Maximilian's works such as his Prayer Book (, 1513) or the illustrated poem (1517).{{citation needed|date=November 2014}}Fraktur quickly overtook the earlier and Textualis typefaces in popularity, and a wide variety of Fraktur fonts were carved and became common in the German-speaking world and areas under German influence (Scandinavia, the Baltic states, Central Europe). In the 18th century, the German Fraktur was further developed by the typographer to create the typeset . While over the succeeding centuries, most Central Europeans switched to Antiqua, German-speakers remained a notable holdout.

Use

File:Michna Ceska maryanska muzyka.jpg||250px|The collection âÄeskÃ¡ mariÃ¡nskÃ¡ muzykaâ|right|thumb|x216px|A Czech example of Fraktur: Title page of by (1647) ("" by old orthography)]] File:Gustav Vasa Bible 1541.jpg|thumb|175px|Front page of Gustav Vasa's Bible from 1541, using Fraktur. The title translated to English reads: "The Bible / That is / All the Holy Scriptures / in Swedish. Printed in . 1541". (Note the use of long slong sTypesetting in Fraktur was still very common in the early 20th century in all German-speaking countries and areas, as well as in Norway, Estonia, and Latvia, and was still used to a very small extent in Sweden, Finland and Denmark,In Denmark in 1902 the percentage of printed material using antiqua amounted to 95% according to R. Paulli, "", i: , published by Grafisk Cirkel, Copenhagen, 1940. while other countries typeset in Antiqua in the early 20th century. Some books at that time used related blackletter fonts such as ; however, the predominant typeface was the , which came in slight variations.

missing image!- Scripts in Europe (1901).jpg -Usage map: A map presenting the contemporary German view of the extent of scripts around 1900. In reality only German-speaking countries, Estonia and Latvia still used Fraktur as the majority script at this time. Denmark had shifted to antiqua during the mid 19th century,R. Paulli, "", i: , published by Grafisk Cirkel, Copenhagen, 1940. and in Norway the majority of printed texts used antiqua around 1900.BOOK, Tore, Rem, Materielle variasjoner. Overgang fra fraktur til antikva i Norge, Mats, Malm, Barbro StÃ¥hle, SjÃ¶nell, Petra, SÃ¶derlund, Bokens materialitet: Bokhistoria och bibliografi, Svenska Vitterhetssamfundet, Stockholm, 2009, 978-91-7230-149-8,

After 1941

Even with the abolition of Fraktur, some publications include elements of it in headlines. Very occasionally, academic works still used Fraktur in the text itself.{{citation needed|date=October 2013}} Notably, 's work "" (The Letters to Timothy and Titus) was published in 1963 using Fraktur. More often, some ligatures ch, ck from Fraktur were used in antiqua-typed editions. That continued mostly up to the offset type period. Fraktur saw a brief resurgence after the war, but quickly disappeared in a Germany keen on modernising its appearance.Fraktur is today used mostly for decorative typesetting: for example, a number of traditional German newspapers such as the , as well as the Norwegian , still print their name in Fraktur on the masthead (as indeed do some newspapers in other European countries and the U.S.) and it is also popular for pub signs and the like. In this modern decorative use, the traditional rules about the use of long s and short s and of ligatures are often disregarded.Individual Fraktur letters are sometimes used in mathematics, which often denotes associated or parallel concepts by the same letter in different fonts. For example, a Lie group is often denoted by G, while its associated Lie algebra is mathfrak{g}. A ring ideal might be denoted by mathfrak{a} (or mathfrak{p} if a prime ideal) while an element is a in mathfrak{a}. The Fraktur mathfrak c is also sometimes used to denote the cardinality of the continuum, that is, the cardinality of the real line. In model theory, mathfrak{A} is used to denote an arbitrary model, with A as its universe. Fraktur is also used in other ways at the discretion of the author.Fraktur is still used among traditional Anabaptists to print German texts, while Kurrent is used as hand writing for German texts. Groups that use both form of traditional German script are the Amish, Old Order Mennonites, Hutterites and traditional German-speaking Mennonites from Russia who live today mostly in Latin America.

Unicode

Unicode does not encode Fraktur as a separate script. Instead, Fraktur is considered a class of fonts of the Latin alphabet. Thus, the additional ligatures that are required for Fraktur fonts will not be encoded in Unicode,WEB,weblink Ligatures, Digraphs, Presentation Forms vs. Plain Text, Unicode Consortium, 7 July 2015, 27 January 2017, and Unicode proposes to deal with these ligatures using smart-font technologies such as OpenType, AAT or Graphite. There are many Fraktur fonts that do not use smart-font technologies, but use their own legacy encoding instead that is not compliant with Unicode.There are, however, two sets of "Fraktur" symbols in the Unicode blocks of mathematical alphanumeric symbols, letterlike symbols, and Latin E. These are meant to be used only in mathematics and are not suitable for typesetting German-language texts, as letters such as long s, Ã¤, Ã¶, Ã¼, and Ã are not encoded.WEB,weblink Ligatures, Digraphs, Presentation Forms vs. Plain Text, Unicode Consortium, 7 July 2015,